With the recent closure of Biffa’s polymer recycling plant in the North-East so soon after its opening and the celebrated end to the UK’s largest plastic recycling plant in Avonmouth owned by Viridor, both with considerable financial cost to their owners, one can wonder what the future of the plastic recycling market is in the UK.
The market seems to have been caught in a perfect storm of tough market conditions characterised by falling demand and prices, global overcapacity of virgin polymer and greater importation of both virgin and recycled polymers from abroad. When you add the policy inertia of the previous Government preventing us implementing EPR and DRS sooner the challenges for this part of the recycling sector have been extreme.
A few years ago and after much industry lobbying, the Government implemented a plastic tax which was supposed to incentivise the use of recycled content, however due to a complete lack of scrutiny on-behalf of the Authorities as to the content of recycled polymer in products entering the UK this fiscal instrument has been a real failure, leaving the market open to the full vagrancies of the market.
So, is there a future for recycling plastic? The present Government has not only sped up the implementation of key recycling regulation, but through the recent ETS consultation re-evaluated its position as to how to de-carbonise the waste stream focusing on the removal of plastics at source thereby better reducing the CO2 emissions from EfW plants. The Government thinks by modulation of the EPR fees to support the extraction of plastics eventually more funding will be available to pay for the cost of recycling plastic. This is perhaps correct but not immediate in its impact.
Therefore, unless EPR can create stable demand for the plastics removed from the waste stream the economics to support further investment in its recycling will not be reached. Only when producers are mandated through EPR to take back their material at a value which supports its extraction, collection and processing will greater circularity of plastics ensue.
The world is presently locked into another negotiation to secure a legally binding international treaty to tackle pollution across the entire lifecycle of plastics. As in previous attempts to control plastic production the oil and plastic producing Countries oppose restrictions on production of polymers preferring a voluntary approach based solely on waste management. Evidence as to the effectiveness of this voluntary approach is graphically seen in the pollution of our oceans today. Producer Responsibility needs to encompass the whole lifecycle including providing the full economic support to recycle the plastics they have produced, until then the industry and consumers will have to do the best they can.
